Recently, the world's first commercial floating offshore wind farm, Hywind, installed a 1MW battery system, which is the world's first battery energy storage system for the offshore wind farm.
The UK's Hywind floating offshore wind farm has a total installed capacity of 30MW, and five 6MW wind turbines are installed. The wind farm is connected to the Peterhead onshore substation in Scotland via a 33kV cable. This battery energy storage system is installed here.
By testing this battery system called Batwind, you can know when to store power and when to supply power to the grid, thereby reducing the possibility of wind curtailment and assisting grid dispatching.
The wind farm operator Equinor (formerly Statoil Norwegian National Oil Company) said that the battery algorithm is based on a variety of data sources, including: weather forecast, market price, maintenance plan, consumption model and grid service.
According to Sebastian Bringsvaerd, development manager at Hywind and Batwind, the significance of this energy storage project is not in the size of storage capacity, but on how to optimize, control and provide smarter energy solutions.
The volatility of renewable energy generation can be managed to some extent by the grid, but in order to make renewable energy more competitive and to enable the grid to accommodate more renewable energy in the future, new smart energy storage needs to be found. The solution to provide stable power. With the Batwind project, you can know how to do this in a smart and value-creating way.
Equinor said that the energy storage system is a bit like an energy warehouse. It needs to choose the construction site of the warehouse (the location of the energy storage system), the size of the warehouse (the capacity of the energy storage) and how to manage and dispatch the components (electricity) in the warehouse.
According to the project, digitization is a key driver of the energy storage system. The more data the Batwind power management system provides, the more intelligent it is. In addition, Batwind can be used for other renewable energy sources, including solar and onshore. Wind energy, they believe that this system solution will be applied to all renewable energy markets.
Norway's Equinor owns a 75% stake in the Hywind project and Masdar holds the remaining 25%. At the beginning of this year, the two companies signed an agreement to analyze the operational data of the Batwind battery system.